Question
I've heard that lucid dreaming is bad for us and we shouldn't try to become conscious during sleep. Can lucid dreaming really harm me?
Answer
Some professional dream workers question the advisability of trying to control the dream, and encourage learning to enjoy and understand it instead. The stated concerns are usually about the person getting enough deep sleep rest and the need for the unconscious to have its way for a particular amount of time per day.
But as advocates of lucid dreaming remind us, even the best of lucid dreamers have very few of them, at best 1 of 6 dreams per night for the extraordinary lucid dreamer. (If you have more lucid dreams than this per night, the Stanford Sleep Laboratories would like you to contact them, and probably offer you some good money to sleep there!) . Also, most people having lucid dreams report a higher degree of restfulness the next day.
See below for further reading and resources on Lucidity and Lucid Control.
2/19/98
Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The
Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet
Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for
the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.
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